The word alibi comes into English from Latin to mean “elsewhere,” and by the middle eighteenth century its legal usage became common as “a plea of having been elsewhere when an action took place.” In her book's title, Norma Cole puts this word next to lullaby, “to calm or hush to sleep,” though a figurative usage of the late sixteenth century suggests a sense of quieting suspicion, a delusive sense of security. Alibi Lullaby locates its poetic sounding in unprocessed meanings, where word, voice, sonorousness, and image join in a process of dissonant vocal utterance. Alibi’s otherness and lullaby’s poetic differentiation between body and other, and the play with and against false senses of security, meet for Cole in the opening epigraph of the book. In an Akkadian lullaby of the Old Babylonian Period, 1950-1530 BC, Cole directs us to the following:
Little one, who dwelt in the house of darkness—
well, you are outside now, have seen the light of the sun.
Why are you crying, why are you yelling?
For some reason I had no words. I had some words but they would not settle into a rhythm. A bodily rhythm hadn’t come yet. Instead coming at me were flying objects fast & furious—“climate crisis,” “migrants,” “separation of children from parents at borders,” “weapons,” “incarceration,” “solitary confinement,” “corporate takeovers,” “fascists,” “the technological singularity,” which kept Stephen Hawking up nights, you name it.
These concerns have been amplified in the past half-decade, with the rise of the far right from India to Germany to the US. The federal government in the US is occupying its own cities, incarcerating and executing civilians while deporting non-citizens without regard for due process. Imperialist powers target countries in the global south for resources and geographic control; Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people continues through the so-called “ceasefire.” Now, Cole’s “flying objects” intensify in a tapestry of concern, creating the background noise to daily thought and action. Poetry, a threshold where words bestow a new reality in their joining, is a twilight state, a place of bodies, of the words of mother and of the “fast & furious” intrusions that are other, often perceived as being from “over there.” But the “over there” is all too real as something here in the junctions of unspoken, psychic forces that bind us to the world. In Cole’s art, poems are presented as brief, lyrical statements that seem detached from a specific, historical incident or occasion, and radiate within the terms of the real that are often mediated away into digestible memes or sound bites. She is concerned with how we tell stories to ourselves about the world we encounter, and how we respond to mediated narratives. In the opening poem, “Take a Look,” Cole observes the vulnerability of memory inside history, opening a fragility of perception in the rote forces of power that condition the daily. She writes
Take history
Take power
At no point sufficient
Accident of memory
The common truth
Conditions of visibility
Unstable orbits
Explain nothing
In the history
Of contestation
Her couplets improvise broad relations of history and power, memory and common truth, to point out “insufficient uncertainties” that “pose limits of understanding.” To be vulnerable, withhold judgment, accept personal limitations—these threshold states indicate for Cole a place for apprehending the inchoate spin of information, these “flying objects—fast & furious.”
In the poems that compose Alibi Lullaby, there is a certain groundedness, a solid presence of outlook committed to the apprehension of language and political action in the determinations of the current catastrophe imposed by new rules of U.S. political and economic coercions. This groundedness is achieved in part by concrete and sensuous images throughout the book, but also through syntax based on reduced syllabic stresses, or by emphasis on trochaic stresses and monosyllabic nouns, along with the enactment of a kind of base-layer grammar built on the rudiments of indefinite articles, conjunctions, and prepositions. This limited word base is seen most prominently in the poem “Lost Dance,” where she writes, “of / on beyond / of from / between / of of / and a / on in.” A baseline music moves in the work that is particular to Cole’s verbal palette. The poems’ cadences are remarkably unified in terms of prosody, and overall the space of the lyric is preserved even as the songs seem to fall apart or go away into an awareness or preoccupation with a political or social horizon.
It is difficult to read Alibi Lullaby without intensely feeling the conflicts of U.S. global and domestic violence amidst striking conflicts of mediatization and the circulation of attitudes based on forms of mis-, dis-, and in- formation. The start of the genocide in Gaza motivated Cole’s approach. “I was writing poems in fits and starts,” she said. “‘Lost Dance’ was the first, although last in the book when October 7 and its aftermath occurred (hasn’t stopped). I had written more or less half the poems at the time but that moment wrote and shaped the rest.” In “Gentle Summons,” for instance, Cole writes:
things themselves
unfinished
as children
encounter
in the ledger
can you erase hunger?
dust shot on the ridge
fell for it
in alignment
light hitting the plant
bomb or leaf?
fusion jumps to conclusion
fall under the apprehension
of seeing and looking away
While poems like this are presented as brief, lyrical statements that detour attention from specific, historical incidents or occasions, they radiate within the terms of the real that are often mediated into digestible memes or sound bites through broadcast and social media. The “dust shot on the ridge” brings awareness to the intimacy of violence that remains typically obscured by mediatized death counts. “Light” on a “leaf,” a closeness of perceived experience, contrasts with “bomb,” the annihilating force of geopolitical circumstance imposed on lived environments in the occupied territories. These scales of contrast correlate with the spatial distance and interior understanding of devastation—“seeing and looking away” common as light on a leaf.
In a similar vein, in “Occasional Placeholder,” she observes,
attention divided
consonant pitch
entrain to the sounds
that surround
weaving and spinning
the amulets
limbs of memories
the doves are coming
at the station
a taxi
the doves, a kite
caught in the
power lines
the bridge in a fog
and the community
of listeners disappears
reflection speaking indirectly
from the force of the sound
sensation displaced in
the voice of another
address stands in
for scriptless gesture
Here, as throughout the book, we find sound, memory, and image interacting in the field of the poem to insist on a kind of readerly dislocation. “The community / of listeners disappears” and we are alone, “displaced in / the voice of another.” The space of lullaby and threshold, but also the “al-“ in alibi, the other, the elsewhere, is amplified in divergence from subject and perception of outer and inner life. Elsewhere is here, too.
In her acknowledgements, Cole draws attention to an essay by Dustin Hellberg titled “Rhythm, Evolution and Neuroscience in Lullabies and Poetry.” He says, “rhythmic meaning stems not just from linguistic or dictionary definitions. The human brain is a primate brain, and as such, bears distinct similarities to non-human brains, despite the obvious and incredible semiotic/linguistic range displayed by homo sapiens. The structures are biological, not linguistic.” The emphasis on the biological corresponds with Cole's poetic form, where the corporeal responses of rhythmic stress enlivens feeling in words whose meanings participate in the established motion. She writes,
I
it
if
like
was
saw
were
filled
rising
billowing
blooming
smoke
flames
smoke
hilltops
ridge
sky
inevitable
visible
shimmering
pinks
purples
browns
off
not
for
gone
Readers will sense a stutter-like dissonance in Alibi Lullaby. The neurological and biological effects of Cole’s stroke twenty-five years ago influenced her speech intimately, complicating the spoken reality of words. Adjacent to an external reality of speech, there is, too, an internal stutter prominent in some North American writing. Susan Howe once remarked that Charles Olson is “at his wisest” when he said, “The stutter is the plot.” Howe continued, “It’s the stutter in American literature that interests me. I hear the stutter as a sounding of uncertainty.” Cole’s work suggests that we grapple with a reality of domestic and global violence as it is filtered through the alibis of governing forces that oppose the democratic appeals of a greater public desire. Instead, lullabies promise a fragile sense of personal security purchased by imperialist actions domestically and abroad. For Cole, words are here with us bodily, and through them a world of actuality must be restored so as to witness in truth events that are typically obscured by lies. We are at threshold vulnerability, rocking inside a hum of a mother tongue whose meaning cannot always mind, as our own tongue or meaning gets lost, slips away, looking for that solid ground, somewhere “over there,” not inside us, where the stutter shifts attention, loosens our hold on who we are, as part of the whole we never fully ascertain.